Question about using all four RAM slots...

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Most of the motherboards out seem to have four slots for DDR ram. I have a board that supports 4 slots of DDR PC3200. Right now I have 1gig running in dual channel (2 x 512), but I need a lot more ram for some work-related programs I run that will easily use over 1gig. I am either going to buy 2 sticks of 512 or 2 sticks of 1gig. I have heard that in a lot of these AMD boards if you use all four slots it will reduce the rating from PC3200 to PC2700 and thus reduce performance. Is this problem caused by having 4gigs of memory (the maximum allowed) or is it caused by simply filling up all four slots regardless of the amount of total memory?

Thank you for the help...
 
filling all four slots or installing all four gigs would force the chipset to relax the timings to improve stability. most people don't know it, but running 4 gigs of standard ddr ram (non-ecc) will not only lower performance but greatly decrease memory reliability. i say you should put two 1GB sticks in, giving you 2 GB of dual channel DDR400.
 
So having 4gigs would relax the timings, but would adding two more sticks of 512 to what I already have (2 sticks of 512) relax the timings? (All four slots would be filled, but I would only have 2gigs.)

Thanks again

You've already answered this, but I'm still holding out hope. I would rather not buy 2gigs if I can avoid it because that would be really expensive and I don't think there are very many good sets that have good timings. The best I could find is ocz ram on newegg that has 2-3-2-8 (I think) and that set of 2gigs is ~$300.
 
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